Blade Healers

Blade Healers

Winning a national art award in 2003, the year
he completed his MFA at Elam, brought Rohan
Wealleans instant notoriety.
The judge described the winning work as a
huge bright vagina that he wanted to crawl inside,
ensuring that the sponsors, a Waikato
electricity supply company, immediately
turned it down for acquisition. Since then,
Rohan Wealleans has carved out his own
special place in the pantheon of male artists
with dodgy sexual politics. The consensus,
even amongst curators who like his work, is
that the artist “flays his surfaces and opens
them in a labial way”. Writers shudder at his
“invasive, violent even misogynistic” incisions
into acrylic paint as if it was flesh. Blade
Healers 2008, recently purchased for The
University of Auckland Art Collection, shows
Wealleans five years on, still unrepentant in
his wielding of the craft knife, apparently
now ready to construe the cutting itself as
therapeutic.

Weighing over 20 kilos, the laboured
surface of the painting reveals the strata of
80 different coats of colour built up
laboriously on a commercial canvas support after
each layer has dried. The accumulation of surfaces
has been carved back so that each figure is
covered with indentations revealing the tide-marks
left by each colour like the rings of a cut tree trunk.
Deploying squatting and languishing female
figures as ciphers to visually link the composition
to the century-old proto-Cubist work by Spanish
painter Pablo Picasso entitled Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon, 1907, Wealleans signals his own
breakthrough. Just as studying the art of so-called
primitive people from the Iberian peninsula
inspired Picasso to facet and fracture the forms
of the naked prostitutes in his figural grouping, so
Wealleans ushers in a new era with his signature
layering of acrylic paint and cutting technique in
Blade Healers. The painting even bore the original
working title Demoiselles before it became Blade
Healers in a word association chain which began
with the work’s predominant colour, and proceeded
via the Australian canine breed, the blue heeler, to
the final amalgam of knife and balm.

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To make his work, Wealleans has cut out
the shapes of five female forms, mimicking the
structure of Picasso’s Demoiselles, and then
re-fixed the excised paint onto the figures as
necklaces and other adornments for the figures.
This approach to recombining cut and reconfigured
paint on a two-dimensional surface is a new
development for Wealleans, who has previously
only applied his marbled off-cuts of layered acrylic
paint to flat surfaces non-figuratively.

Made during the artist’s recent residency in the
McCahon house in Titirangi, Blade Healers uses
the same method of rail and suspension for an
unstretched canvas that the original occupant of
that house used for his Northland Panels.
McCahon’s eight-panel masterpiece was famously
painted outside on the deck at 67 Otitori Road one
sunny afternoon in November 1958. Made metres
away almost exactly 50 years later, Wealleans’s
reprise occupied him for a full four months.

Linda Tyler

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The Artist

Winning a national art award in 2003, the year he completed his MFA at Elam, brought Rohan Wealleans instant notoriety. The judge described the winning work as a huge bright vagina that he wanted to crawl inside, ensuring that the sponsors, a Waikato electricity supply company, immediately turned it down for acquisition. Since then, Rohan Wealleans has carved out his own special place in the pantheon of male artists with dodgy sexual politics. The consensus, even amongst curators who like his work, is that the artist “flays his surfaces and opens them in a labial way”. Writers shudder at his “invasive, violent even misogynistic” incisions into acrylic paint as if it was flesh. Blade Healers 2008, recently purchased for The University of Auckland Art Collection, shows Wealleans five years on, still unrepentant in his wielding of the craft knife, apparently now ready to construe the cutting itself as therapeutic.